Ed Green clears a foggy windshield at the beginning of his shift with the North Carolina Department of Transportation in Winston-Salem. Green works several jobs but still doesn’t earn as much as he used to as a bus driver in New York. Photo: Bonnie Jo Mount/Washington Post

DOWNEY, CALIF. — One day in 1967, Bob Thompson sprayed foam on a hunk of metal in a cavernous factory south of Los Angeles. And then another day, not too long after, he sat at a long wood bar with a black-and-white television hanging over it, and he watched that hunk of metal land a man on the moon.